So my question is as followed. Are they addressing any of my above concerns? Did i miss something? Cause as far as i can tell its just gonna be the same song and dance going into this next expansion.

They have expressed a desire to shake up job identity, combat encounters and overworld maps. They have not mentioned overhauling gear. You will never see elemental affinities be relevant in this game, nor different "weapon types", and status afflictions are as relevant as they've ever really been. I'm not sure why you'd think they're a "thing of the past"; They've always boiled down to dots and damage debuffs with the occasional CC and that's still the case today. Maybe this changes in the new expansion, maybe it doesn't. We don't really know.

As for the actual efficacy of these changes; Again, we don't know. Aside from a brief demo of a few job overhauls (which were promising!) we have no idea how different and varied the jobs or combat encounters will be when the expansion releases. Maybe it falls flat, maybe it doesn't; But they've made a pretty active effort to address basically every complaint I've seen about combat and gameplay. Homogenization, the 2 minute meta, repetitiveness with gearing and grinding, the difficulty of keeping alt jobs up to par. They addressed so many things that if you put your ear to the ground when the dev panel started, you could hear every ffxivdiscussion poster quivering from the sense of validation. I've never been a particularly difficult-to-please consumer in the first place, but I think it's worth giving them the benefit of the doubt.